Polymer-Driven and Hybrid Actuation Fabrics: Integrating Responsive Polymeric Materials and Hierarchical Textile Architectures

Textile fabrics have served as a second skin for millennia, yet their potential as active engineering systems is only beginning to be realized. Historically, most smart textiles have treated fabrics as passive substrates for sensors, conductors, or rigid motors. A paradigm shift is underway toward intrinsic actuation fabrics, where active polymers—including liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), twisted and coiled polymer actuators (TCPAs), and shape memory polymers (SMPs), as well as polymeric yarn/fabric matrices integrating shape memory alloys (SMAs), serve as functional engines to generate motion, force, or shape change. Despite rapid progress in functional materials development, a critical gap persists between fiber-level actuation mechanics and fabric-level system implementation. This review addresses that transition by establishing a four-tier hierarchical framework (Fiber, Yarn, Fabric, and System) to clarify how responsive building blocks are structurally integrated. We systematically analyze how traditional textile architectures—including woven, knitted, braided, and non-woven structures—mechanically amplify, redirect, or constrain the intrinsic stroke and force of active polymers and SMA-polymeric hybrids. By bridging recent advances in polymer materials science with textile structural mechanics, this review provides structural design strategies and highlights grand challenges in wearability, durability, and system integration for next-generation polymeric soft actuation fabrics.